The War Is Over (And You're Never Going Home)
by RocksCanFly
Summary: When you were twenty-two you blew-up the capitol building of the Atlantean city of Posideonis. One year and a hundred nightmares later there are days you stand on the edge of rooftops and dare yourself to jump. (or, The Invasion Is Over But The Fight Never Really Will Be, And Kaldur'ahm Of Shayeris's Real Superpower Is Not What He'd Expected)


Some angsty shit unburied from the hard-drive while looking for my notes on Recovery, which can be found on AO3.

* * *

When you were twenty-two you were made aware of a plot to blow-up the capitol building of the Atlantean city of Posideonis. Your father instructed that you be posted as a guard while others set the charges. You were given every chance to turn on the metal-suited men who threatened the lives of the people you'd claimed to have abandoned.

You did not take it.

The cloud of red that rose from the destroyed building reminded you of the fire that is said to burn in the Hell Zatanna once told you of, long ago.

* * *

One year and a hundred nightmares later there are days you stand on the edge of rooftops and dare yourself to jump.

These are the days when the newspaper headlines mention the latest and greatest of your expedient atrocities. Freed from the worry of the Reach and the general increased terrorist activity that accompanied the Invasion, media ties between land and sea have begun to pick back up where they left off. Every day wounds that long scarred over in the ocean are torn open anew under the dry air of your new home.

The world is as good at tearing down its heroes as it is at building them, maybe better. There was nothing you could have done, your friends tell you, and you nod and keep your silence and in your head you're screaming that _of course_ there was; because there had to have been, there _had to_ have, because if the only way to save the world is to be a _monster_ then what the hell have you been fighting for? How different are you _really_ from the Light and their dream of a humanity that's gone galactic and glorious?

So you stand on the edge of buildings and teeter-totter to peer over to the world below and don't bother trying to block out the screaming in your head that's half guilty shame and half memories of the day the once glorious city that haunts your memories became ground zero.

* * *

The first time anyone _touched_ you since Roy left you to chase ghosts and you left the world behind to become the guardian monster beneath the bed was three days after Wally West disappeared from this Earth.

She was drunk and tired and admitted she'd thought about it once upon a time when she and Wally weren't serious yet and even after they _were_ , hey, she still had _eyes_. She doesn't go far, just smashes her lips sloppily to your own and makes a half-hearted grab at your ass. Before you have the chance to react she's slipped off you and her chair and onto the floor.

She sits there and laughs until she hiccups and lets you put her to bed. She snorts into your neck when you carry her and comments that she wishes she could have loved you instead, because after all you've been through you're still _here_ and all it took to take _him_ from her was one day too many playing a game he tried to leave years ago.

When you kiss her sweaty forehead and politely force a glass of water down her throat she calls Roy Harper a lucky bastard who doesn't deserve the nice people who love him, and _don't you ever get sick of the monsters that love you, you stupid fish angel_?

You keep your peace and tuck her in; but at the back of your mind you wonder. You wonder what she could have possibly thought the wreckage of Atlantis that she found in you had meant. You wonder if she ever wondered why you tried to end yourself when she found you in the ruins. You wonder what she thinks the reason is behind why you hadn't gone home or why no Atlantean (not even La'gann or Garth) could look at you for a week after the debrief that laid all your sins at your feet.

You wonder what she'll think of you- _how_ she'll think of you, when she finds out.

* * *

One warm Saturday evening Jaime Reyes comes up to you, nervous and stuttering, and invites you to Mass.

You are, in all practices and beliefs, a pagan. You are not the kind of person who goes to Mass, who lays the meaning and substance of the world at the feet of an omniscient and omnipotent distant father. Your gods are capricious and prideful, as prone to folly as any other being- you have never concerned yourself with their judgments. Whatever you have done, they have done it more fantastically and with consequences a thousand-fold as devastating.

But your mother raised you to be polite, so you accept the invitation graciously.

It is not until the Communion (and the confessional that proceeds it) that you understand his offer. He is trying to extend to you the benediction he has found in the small, vaulted ceiling and stained glass and soft, chanting prayers of his God. His is trying to do for you what no one else has done- to give you acknowledgement that, yes, you are guilty of terrible things; but with the caveat that someone, somewhere, can absolve you.

You thank him politely as you exit the small church, and vow never to step foot in one again. The hubris of it, that anyone can _forgive_ another the murder of one hundred and four people, is too much for your Greco-pantheionic sensibilities to bear.

* * *

Three weeks, one introduction to your godchild, and once years-in the-making reconciliation later, you are standing at the top of the highest building in Star City.

When you were young and still welcome in the sea, a fall from this height wouldn't have killed you. You would have descended slowly and gracefully, if at all, and the consequences of your tumble off the edge would be nonexistent.

But you exist in the land of air now. There is no water to catch your weight and bear you up against gravity- your every step is weighted and heavy, and a single slip in this moment would end with you as so much red paste on the concrete.

You stay there, swaying in the wind and thinking wistfully of the time in your life when an excursion to land sounded like a fantastic adventure.

An eternity later Roy Harper finds you and pulls you back from the literal and figurative edge. He calls you Idiot and wraps his strong, scarred arms around your unshaking shoulders. He promises that Next Time he'll help you find another way. He doesn't talk about the past, doesn't offer you benediction. He knows that you're not looking out towards that first and final flight because of the hundred or so lives you've already taken.

He knows you are not afraid of the dead.

You're scared because one day someone, somewhere, will ask you to take _more_.

* * *

A thing that people who don't spend their off evenings in tights and spandex and who only respond to one name never have to learn: In the years since its inception, The League's lost more heroes to sudden retirements and shotgun kisses that came after Too-Little-Too-Late missions than it ever has to alien invasions.

On the rare occasion that someone on the outside learns this, it often makes little sense to them.

But for people like you (like Wally West and Jaime Reyes and Tula of Posiodonis) _dying_ isn't the worst that could happen; not being able to save people who depend on you, who _trust_ you.

That's the worst.

(Wally West didn't put down the cape until Tula of Posiodonis died. The people who accuse him of being a coward are right, but not for the right reasons. Wally wasn't afraid of his death- he was afraid that one day Artemis Crock would be the one in danger and there'd be nothing he could do to save her)

You are twenty-two years old.

You allowed one hundred and four people to die one day because you balanced their lives against those of the seven billion other people on this planet. You performed the dreadful algebra and the answer found those one hundred and four _wanting_.

So now you are the second oldest in the new generation of heroes, and not five years in to your actual career you are already the person that people look to when there's six different disasters occurring at once and you've only got enough firepower on board to handle five of them.

They don't look to you because they know you'll find the way to beat the odds, even if that's what you've managed, so far, to do.

They look to you because sometimes someone has to make a _choice_ ; you've done it once and you're still standing. So now they look to you to do it again. Your magic trick, your signature move, the rabbit you pull out of the hat is no longer your constructs or your resilience or your tactics- it's the blood on your hands and your ability to live with it being there.

And _this_ , the prospect of being _that_ person, the next The Question- it _terrifies_ you.

When your terror drives you to that teetering, tempting edge- Roy Harper reaches out and grabs you up and promises he'll never let you make that choice again.

And whoever said that "I love you" are the powerful words in the English language was a damn fool because the real ones are obviously "We'll find a way."


End file.
